Listen to Angela Duckworth on Grit in Podcasts

Listen to Angela Duckworth on Grit from EconTalk in Podcasts. https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/econtalk/id135066958?mt=2&i=1000373059701

How important is grit relative to talent? Can grit be taught? Angela Duckworth of the University of Pennsylvania and author of Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance talks with with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the nature of success in work, play and life. How much does grit matter? Is grit malleable or something we're born with? Duckworth discusses her research on these questions and how to think about what it means for a child and an adult to thrive.

Sent from my iPhone

The Power And Problem Of Grit : NPR

I say if you pack an article with Dr. Angela Duckworth's work on GRIT, Carol Dweck's work Growth Mindsets and Anders Ericsson's work on deliberate practice and the 10,000 hour rule then you've got a power packed article.   Enjoy.


from NPR.org 

http://www.npr.org/2016/04/04/472162167/the-power-and-problem-of-grit

The Power And Problem Of Grit

Daniel Fishel for NPR

Before she was a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, Angela Duckworth was a middle school math teacher. As a rookie teacher, she was surprised when she calculated grades. Some of her sharpest students weren't doing so well, while others who struggled through each lesson were getting A's.

"The thing that was revelatory to me was not that effort matters—everybody knows that effort matters," Angela told Shankar. "What was revelatory to me was how much it matters."

This revelation led her back to school, this time as a graduate student, to study a character trait she calls grit, defined as passion and perseverance for long-terms goals. She studied national spelling bee contestants, Green Berets, public school students, West Point cadets, sales representatives, and teachers. Across all these domains, she found those who made it through and did the best were not always the smartest, but they were the grittiest. Since then her work has captured the attention of high-ranking CEOs, educators, and coaches—among them Pete Carroll of the Seattle Seahawks. (You can find out your grit score here). Angela believes grit is made up of four key psychological assets: interest, practice, purpose, and hope.

Most of us can quickly grasp the importance of perseverance for success. But that's only half of the equation, according to Angela. The other half is an abiding interest and passion for a singular pursuit. Gritty people wake up thinking about the same questions they go to bed thinking about. Rather than being "discovered" through angst-ridden introspection, psychologists believe interests are developed and deepened over time through continuing engagement with a pursuit.

And psychologists find people at the tippy-top of their fields engage with their work differently. You've probably heard of the "10,000 hour rule," the average number of hours it takes an expert to become an expert. That's based on research by K. Anders Ericsson, who found that experts do an intensive-kind of practice called "deliberate practice."

In her interviews with people at the top of their fields, Angela found they describe their work as being imbued with meaning and a desire to help others. She finds they are driven by a purpose beyond the self. This is also what psychologists Amy Wrzesniewski and Barry Schwartz have find in their research. If you haven't heard last week's episode, Shankar talked with Amy about how people find meaning and purpose at work.
Gritty people also have hope. They're optimistic about the future and their ability to improve and affect change. To cultivate hope, Angela points to Stanford Professor Carol Dweck's work on growth mindset, the belief that intelligence isn't fixed but can change over time. Angela also points to her PhD advisor Marty Seligman's work on learned optimism.

But other research has also pointed to a potential downside to grit. Like stubborness, too much grit can keep us sticking to goals, ideas, or relationships that should be abandoned.

Psychologist Gale Lucas and her colleagues found in one experiment that gritty individuals will persist in trying to solve unsolvable puzzles at a financial cost. And that's a limitation of grit: it doesn't give you insight into when it will help you prevail and when it will keep you stuck in a dead-end.

So what can teachers, coaches, and parents do to cultivate grit? Psychologists are still working that out, but Angela has assembled research on what they do know here.

Angela's first book, Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance comes out next month.

The Hidden Brain Podcast is hosted by Shankar Vedantam and produced by Kara McGuirk-Alison, Maggie Penman and Max Nesterak. To subscribe to our newsletter, click here. You can also follow us on Twitter@hiddenbrain, @karamcguirk, @maggiepenman and@maxnesterak, and listen for Hidden Brain stories every week on your local public radio station.

Sent from my iPhone

 http://angeladuckworth.com/qa/


Sent from my iPhone

I feel gritty...

Interesting Test.

https://sasupenn.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_06f6QSOS2pZW9qR

Your grit score is: 3.88

You are grittier than at least 70% of the US population.

They said it, and I quote!!

Dean Smith, former North Carolina basketball coach:

"Once a year an athlete may be made insufferable by praise. Every other day in the year a deserving athlete will drop out of a sport for want of a word of praise."

Bob Bruce, Former Senior PGA Pro:

"I used to play with a guy who was such an inveterate cheat that when he made a hole-in-one he wrote down 0 on his scorecard"

Ara Parseghian, former Notre Dame football coach:

"The best time to make friends is before you need them."

Father Hesburgh, Notre Dame:

"Ten years after the average athlete graduates, everyone will have forgotten when and where he played, but every time he opens his mouth, everyone will know whether he was educated." 

Kay Yow, former NC State women's basketball coach:

"It's important for your team to know what you stand for and what you won't stand for."

Chuck Noll, former Pittsburgh Steelers coach:

 "Coaches who scrimmage all the time probably don't know what to practice."

Bryan Lewis, NHL referee after Tiger Williams, former NHL tough guy skated over to him and said:

"Look at Walker and Schultz hammering each other. Add up their IQ's and it wouldn't come to 11." 

Lewis: "Why don't you jump in and make it an even dozen?"

Dale Brown, former LSU basketball coach:

"How come the NCAA needs a 500 page manual when the Ten Commandments can fit on a 3x5 card?"

Time Magazine 8/25/1961 edition, on umpires:

"The umpire should combine the integrity of a Supreme Court judge, the physical Agility of an acrobat, the endurance of Job, and the heart of a serial killer."

Frank Deford on Keyshawn Johnson:

"Before they made Keyshawn, they should have broken the mold."

Mickey Rivers, after hearing Reggie Jackson brag that he had a 140 IQ:

"Out of what? A thousand?"

Lou Piniella, on an argument he had with an umpire:

"I cussed him out in Spanish and he threw me out in English."

Vin Scully, recalling Tommy Lasorda's reaction after Jack Clark's 9th inning HR eliminates the Dodgers from 1985 playoffs:

"Tommy Lasorda looked up to the Big Dodger in the sky and cried 'Why me?' and the Big Dodger in the sky replied: 'Because you should have walked him, dummy'"

True Grit - Angela Duckworth

Great work by Angela Duckworth demonstrating the link between perseverance and success. This trait correlates well to success across many different arenas. Who would have thunk it? Score one for the old-schoolers.

From ironshrink.com:
True Grit | Iron Shrink: "But Duckworth et al. noticed that none of the Big Five predict success very accurately. Nor does intelligence, by itself. At least one study cited by the authors suggests that any single Big Five personality trait accounts for less than 2% of variance in achievement. Intelligence only accounts for up to one third of the variance in some measures of success."

Something is conspicuously absent from the Big Five. Duckworth and company wondered, as did William James a century earlier, “why do some individuals accomplish more than others of equal intelligence?” Being the intrepid researchers that they are, they began to ask around:

“Our hypothesis that grit is essential to high achievement evolved during interviews with professionals in investment banking, painting, journalism, academia, medicine, and law. Asked what quality distinguishes star performers in their respective fields, these individuals cited grit or a close synonym as often as talent. In fact, many were awed by the achievements of peers who did not at first seem as gifted as others abut whose sustained commitment to their ambitions was exceptional. Likewise, many noted with surprise that prodigiously gifted peers did not end up in the upper echelons of their fields.”

In other words, some people simply work harder than others, but that’s not all. They do it in a particular way.

Long-term goals: Grit involves more than a solid work ethic and self-discipline. Hard work by itself is not enough to secure the type of success created by long-term, sustained effort. Back in my loading dock days, I worked very hard and gained no more reward in that environment than guys who did far less. One of the secrets of grit, according to the authors, is passion for long-term goals.

“Grit entails working strenuously toward challenges, maintaining effort and interest over years despite failure, adversity, and plateaus in progress. The gritty individual approaches achievement as a marathon; his or her advantage is stamina. Whereas disappointment or boredom signals to others that it is time to change trajectory or cut losses, the gritty individual stays the course.”

Commitment: Self-control is not enough, either. In fact, it’s a poor predictor of success in long-term goals.

“An individual high in self-control but moderate in grit may, for example, effectively control his or her temper, stick to his or her diet, and resist the urge to surf the Internet at work – yet switch careers annually.”

Determination: Even the need for achievement is not enough. In fact, the need for recognition can be a hindrance in long-term success. The gritty individual stays the course even when times are tough.

“Whereas individuals high in need for achievement pursue goals that are neither too easy nor too hard, individuals high in grit deliberately set for themselves extremely long-term objectives and do not swerve from them – even in the absence of positive feedback.”

I think I can, I know I can

The gritty individual sets long term goals, does not waver from them, and is able to ride out the rough patches – even when it means tolerating punishment or foregoing reward for long periods. The authors noticed that grit was a better predictor of first summer retention at West Point then was self-control or the Admission Committee’s prediction of the cadet’s abilities. (Self-control was a better predictor of later academic performance, though.)

Among spelling bee contestants, “gritty finalists outperformed their less gritty peers at least in part because they studied longer. Specifically, weekend hours of practice mediated the relationship between grit and final round.” The pertinacious progenture were clearly more distingue and perspicacious.

If the benefits of grit aren’t obvious by now, the authors spell it out: “among relatively intelligent individuals, those who are less bright than their peers compensate by working harder and with more determination.” It’s these gritty individuals who eventually win the day and achieve their goals. More often than not, great leaps forward are achieved through sustained effort rather than a solid but meandering work ethic. Just ask Winston Churchill.

Hope for guys like me

I love the underdog. Heck, I was the underdog. As a fetus, I lacked the foresight to be born rich or good looking and, like many kids, I had a few legitimate challenges to overcome. The beauty of this study is that it sheds light on one of the great equalizers on an unfair planet. This study offers hope for guys like me.

No matter how we enter the world, perseverance and determination can carry us farther than our talents alone. Sometimes, the rewards of grit can even show up quickly, as they did among undergraduates at an elite university who “scored higher in grit [and] earned higher GPAs than their peers, despite having lower SAT scores.” While the authors did not state it outright, I suspect that sustained effort helps a person develop a level of skill that they would not otherwise possess.

Another beautiful thing about grit: it’s free, and anybody can do it. In one of the six sub-studies comprising this paper, the authors noticed that grit tends to increase automatically with age. Apparently, experience teaches us that “quitting plans, shifting goals, and starting over repeatedly are not good strategies for success.” If we tend to learn that lesson intuitively, then there is no reason a person cannot choose to plot a long-term course and stick to it.

---
FROM WIKIPEDIA:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grit_(personality_trait)

Grit is defined as “perseverance and passion for long-term goals.” [2] Building upon biographical collections of famous leaders in history, researchers and scientists have reached similar conclusions about high achieving individuals. Specifically, those individuals who were deemed more successful and influential than their contemporary counterparts typically possessed traits above and beyond that of normal ability.[3][4][5] While ability was still critically important, these individuals also possessed “zeal” and “persistence of motive and effort.”[2] Duckworth and colleagues (2007) believe this dual-component of Grit to be a crucial differentiator from similar constructs. Grit is conceptualized as a stable trait that does not require immediate positive feedback.[2] Individuals high in Grit are able to maintain their determination and motivation over long periods of time despite experiences with failure and adversity. Their passion and commitment towards the long-term objective is the overriding factor that provides the stamina required to “stay the course” amid challenges and set-backs. Essentially, the Grittier person is focused on winning the marathon, not the sprint.

From Positive Psychology News:
http://positivepsychologynews.com/news/emiliya-zhivotovskaya/200902211582

Grit


Grit is defined as perseverance and passion toward long-term goals (Duckworth et al. 2006). Gritty people tend to persevere, self-regulate and push themselves toward success. Drs. Angela Duckworth and Martin Seligman (2006) found that the correlation between self-discipline and achievement was twice as large as the correlation between IQ and achievement.

Additional research suggests that people with grit:

report experiencing more happiness than those who are less gritty, even when controlling for age and education;
earn higher GPAs than their non-gritty classmates, even with lower SATs scores;
are more likely to outperform in spelling bee contests, regardless of verbal IQ.

The article links some of Duckworth's conclusions with those of Carol Dweck (another favorite).

Fixed Mindset People Do Not Love Effort

This is a difficult message for people to embrace who believe in fixed intelligence or proclivity for success. That belief is what Dr. Carol Dweck refers to as fixed mindset. Those in a fixed mindset tend to believe that effort is a bad thing, if they have what it takes to be smart, gifted or talented by nature than they should not need much effort. This type of belief decreases the motivation to work towards long term goals.

Interestingly, according to Dweck, simply learning about fixed mindset causes changes in people’s belief systems. They are more likely to accept a growth mindset- or the belief that effort, embracing challenges and seeking out learning opportunities is a stronger predictor of success. This encourages developing a grittier perspective, contributing to wanting to put more effort and time in.

A few years ago I completed the NYC half-marathon. This was a stretch goal. I had never ran more than 4 miles in my life. It took grit to get to the race and even more to complete it. Nevertheless, afterward I felt so proud and the positive emotions were self-reinforcing.

The mantra of the Army is, “Be all that you can be.” Grit, perseverance and self-regulation towards long term goals can make that happen.